A subsidiary of the Chinese e-commerce giant has a new smartphone operating system that can run Android applications. 

 

Alibaba Cloud Computing ("AliCloud"), developer of advanced data-centric cloud computing service and a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, has unveiled its internally developed cloud-based mobile operating system "Aliyun OS", while "Yun" stands for "Cloud" in Mandarin pronunciation. 

 

"Mobile users want a more open and convenient mobile OS, one that allows them to truly enjoy all that the Internet has to offer right in the palm of their hand, and the cloud OS, with its use of cloud-based applications, will provide that,” said Wang Jian, president of Alibaba Cloud Computing. 

 

The Aliyun OS make use of cloud apps to bring better user experience, yet the OS also has built-in email, internet search, weather updates, mapping an GPS functions. Software developers can build applications based on internet technology like HTML5 and JavaScript. Each cloud OS user will be provided with 100GB of integrated cloud storage, to synchronize contact information, call logs, text messages, notes and photos to AliCloud's remote data centre. The cloud OS is even fully compatible with Android-based applications, thanks to the AliCloud's self-developed distributed file system that supports Dalvik virtual machines. 

 

 

The first Aliyun OS powered phone is being made by Tianyu as we have mentioned in our article earlier, and is called "K-Touch Cloud-Smart Phone W700". The phone comes with 10 colors, a NVIDIA Tegra2 Dual cortex-A9 1 GHz CPU, a 3.8-inch WVGA monitor, 8GB ROM and 512MB RAM, 32GB SD card storage, and a 5 mega-pixel camera. The OS also equips with full-functioned local content such as Taobao, one of the largest online store, and a subsidiary of Alibaba Group. 

 

W700 will be available to the Chinese market at the end of July with the price of RMB2680 (US$ 416), similar to a mid-ranged Android smartphone like Motorola DEFY, the first waterproof Android phone. 

 

The cloud OS and the service behind is simply a little bit of everything. The cloud service is very much alike the Apple iCloud service unveiled in June, despite AliCloud is being more "generous" on storage space, as every user will be provided with 100GB of cloud storage, while Apple iCloud only provides 5GB for free accounts. The form factor of its first smartphone and the UI design is similar to many Android phones. 

 

Will the new OS cause a threat to those existing operating systems? I don't think so, as right now the Aliyun OS and the new phone is focus on the Chinese market, and the acceptance among Chinese is yet to be determined. 

 

Cloud based OS is going to be a new battlefield for mobile devices. Apart from the newly unveiled Aliyun OS, Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox web browser, plans to build a operating system for mobile devices to "pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web". However, cloud based OS requires a stable and fast mobile network to back up, some markets will find it hard to adopt.